Roger Katan


Roger G. Katan is a French-American architect, planner, sculptor, and activist born in Berguent, Eastern Morocco, on January 5, 1931. Based in the United States in the early 1960s, he was an active founder of advocacy planning, participatory democracy applied to urban planning. As a kinetic artist, he collaborated and exhibited with rising figures of postmodern art. After 1975, Katan became involved in humanitarian relief and continued to encourage participatory practices and self-management. His method favors traditional, sustainable agriculture and construction. In 1999 he moved to Sauve, southern France, where he resumed work on kinetic sculpture and publications.

Biography

After graduating from Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Katan won a scholarship to MIT in 1960, where he earned a master's degree in Architecture and Urban Design. From 1961 to 1963, he worked for Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. From 1964 to 1975, he lived and worked in New York City. Based in East Harlem, he taught architecture and urban planning at Pratt Institute, City College of New York, and Pratt Graduate School of Tropical Architecture for ten years, with one year spent at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, practicing and teaching advocacy planning. He created, with Pratt and City College graduate students, one of the first Community Design Centers, offering free technical assistance to community organizations.
He supported the Civil Rights Movement and the students' claim for social responsibility. In 1964, Katan was already prescribing participation and putting his talent as an architect in the service of the poorest when Paul Davidoff tossed the phrase advocacy planning. Concurrently, Katan's publications and conferences helped spread the word throughout the United-States, Europe, and beyond. He was invited by student organizations calling for social change. His talks included Yale, Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Columbia, etc. Katan obtained American citizenship in 1968.
From 1963 to 1975, Katan was also involved in the art world. As a kinetic sculptor, he exchanged views and exhibited with artists such as Allan Kaprow, Roy lichtenstein, and Robert Smithson. The early sixties saw the emergence of Pop Art and the revival of the kinetic movement, initiated in Europe in the 1930s. Using scrap materials like egg cartons, Katan developed structures evoking abstract cities. "Eternized" by a resin bath, his materials captured and reflected natural and artificial light. His sculptures became models of imaginary cities and villages, some of which resemble the artist's birthplace in Morocco.
From 1975 to 1999, he was actively involved in humanitarian relief and development as a consultant, mostly in Africa and Latin America, on behalf of the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, and the French Technical Cooperation. Faithful to his principles, the advocate planner kept privileging the interests of the people and encouraging self-management. His intervention programs included resettlement, microcredit, education, etc. In both agriculture and construction, Katan has always encouraged traditional methods as well as local, sustainable materials.
Hired by the United Nations Development Program, Katan monitored the creation of a local microcredit network in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, West Africa, in 1976-78. The network has now grown to become a national organization, Réseau National des Caisses Populaires du Burkina. He supervised a displacement program in Mali in 1978 and the creation of a National Construction Standards Institute in Bamako in 1979. After 1980, he was hired on short-term contracts by the European Union, the United Nations, and various NGOs for missions in Central and South America. Katan helped individuals restore their traditions through small self-managed productive projects. In 1980, he advised the Dutch Technical Cooperation in Colombia to rethink rural education and in 1984 Katan built the first New Rural School for the Colombian government. Over 15,000 rural schools based on this model now exist throughout Latin America.
In 1981 photographs and plans of an adobe house designed by Katan for a displacement in Mali were shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The "Architectures de terre" exhibition was curated by Jean Dethier.
Katan has published two books in French, De quoi se mêlent les urbanistes?, about advocacy planning, and Bâtir ensemble, a methodology for participatory practice. De quoi se mêlent les urbanistes? was translated into Italian. Construire ensemble received a grant from the Graham Foundation in 2010 for its English translation and update. Building Together was released in the U.S. by New Village Press in 2014, with two new chapters by Ronald Shiffman, founder of the Pratt Center for Community Development in 1963 and pioneer of advocacy planning.
In 1999 Katan moved to Sauve, southern France, where he helped his current wife Julie, a ceramic artist, and Aline Crumb, a comic strip artist, launch their art gallery, Galerie VP. There Katan has exhibited his early kinetic works together with his latest sculptures. His new works use state-of-the-art technology, including plastics, LED, and wireless devices.

Education

Katan attended primary school in Berguent, Eastern Morocco, near the Algerian border, whose population was then about 800.
wrote in her cultural guidebook about New York:

Personal publications

File:Progressive Architecture, July 1968.jpg|thumb|: "Roselights for Whiteville
, a sculpture by architect Roger Katan, is a study of light and motion integrated into a series of 'megaforms' for an abstract cityscape. Photo: Jon Naar."|338x338px
From 1963 to 1975, Katan's works were shown in museums and galleries, including Finch College Museum of Art in New York, and various art festivals.
Wayne Anderson, the MIT Art historian and critic, wrote about his work:
In Katan's most recent compositions, the shapes and colors of the solids intertwine, casting light and colors through matter… These works are inspired by the recent discovery of the elementary particles in the primordial fireball at time zero, when the infinitely small collided with the infinitely big… The power of changing lights enhances and transforms matter. Colors and shapes merge, then alternately combine and separate, and the viewer's optic nerve finishes the painting. At time zero, why are some bosons such as photons, a.k.a. light particles, massless while others are massive? What caused this phenomenon to occur? First you enjoy a moment of peace and purity, the gentle breeze of colors and matter blowing through your mind… Then total chaos breaks out, fueled by luminous upheavals and apocalyptic visions, slowly rising and receding to finally let life emerge from the symbolic eggshells—and a new order arises. The changing colors of the LEDs shine through the translucent solids depending on the viewer's frame of mind—and creative remote control. Matter and light are the sacred essence of all creation, the founding elements of life and mankind… The brighter the signs, the deeper they echo within… Then our eyes are caught by the colors projected by LEDs through a spinning helicoid, inviting us to enter the ever-changing magnetic vortex of polar lights and their haunting mystery.

Selected exhibitions